Migrating Into Spring

For some living things it is a migration through time that ushers in their seemingly too brief visit each spring. For others it’s a journey through both time and space. In each case April brings “magic” to the central Ohio woods and meadows. It’s a time of beauty in small things as the grander landscape has just begun to put on its coat of…

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker Takes Up Residence

So far this spring it’s been colder than normal and rainy. Migrating birds and the resident wildflowers that would have enchanted us in the first week of April continue to be illusive. A couple of days ago we returned from a local metro park with just the barest of photographic evidence that spring is actually here. Today, as I write this, snowflakes can be…

Spring Walk

Despite a colder than normal spring with some trees showing just a hint of green, the longer days and the now more persuasive rays of the sun continue their call for nature to awake. Recently our walks in the wooded areas of local city parks have carried with them the unavoidable expectation of the season. Sometimes with the expectation of the season comes the…

Whisper Of Spring

On some days in early spring the whisper of life is not heard above the howl of wind through still bare branches of waking trees. A warm embrace under sunny blue skies one day turns into a gray freezing flurried rebuff the next. With it’s fits and starts spring makes doubters of us all. The woods do not yet invite. A stark barren seemingly…

A Moment of Magic

The central Ohio winter landscape seldom beckons with snow draped conifers or the flowing design of a meandering creek through a landscape blanketed in white. Still, if one looks closely there is beauty. “Flowers” in a season when there are none. *** For several days temperatures struggled to get out of the teens. *** Yesterday it finally warmed into the thirties. Even though our…

The Nuthatch Speaks

Somewhere in the overhead branches of a neighborhood tree a Nuthatch is speaking. They do that often in a voice that leaves little room for reply so we content ourselves just to listen. Try as we might we never did see that particular bird. A voice evoking mystery in a tree’s tangled up-reaching branches. Such mystery is accepted because we know, given enough time,…

May It Always Be So

Now when I go into the woods, camera in hand, I find that there is much less concern about “getting the picture” and more about just being there. Perhaps that’s because in some miraculous way, the skills required to get an acceptable photograph of something crawling, walking, running or flying have slowly transformed me into the “camera”. Now being in nature is more the…

Thankgiving

Each year at this time we are greeted by visitors from the north. Some just show up at backyard feeders while others are only seen after much patient looking. Despite its beauty, autumn brings the demise of many living things and confronts one with a darker side of existence. Overhead a dragonfly cruises by one day and the next is gone, it’s kind not…

Autumn Woods

We are fascinated by the few intrepid wildflowers that continue blooming late into autumn. On a larger scale, as we walked along the wooded shore of a local reservoir, we are also carried away by the thought that nature in all it’s expanse is now in bloom. On a much smaller scale fungi continue to “bloom” and will do so long after the flowers…

Autumn Song

High overhead an Osprey gives no notice but now as we walk along the shore sycamores sing in a tenor voice as they respond to the ebb and flow of a weightier October wind. Gone is their murmur in the gentleness of a moist summer breeze. In a fight to remain on ever barer branches the rattle of their autumn dryness soon gives way…